


what, by night, illuminates

by warsfeil



Series: let not light see my black and deep desires [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Gen, Ghosts, M/M, spooky shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 12:43:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20706200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/warsfeil/pseuds/warsfeil
Summary: Ari and Aelar carry their tenuous partnership into a derelict, haunted mansion in an attempt to escape a thunderstorm. It goes, as you would expect, Poorly.Or: "A paladin and a wizard adopt a cat."





	what, by night, illuminates

The rain was _miserable_. They were both soaked through every single layer of clothing, and even the normal jingling of Ari’s armor was muffled in wet exhaustion. 

“This,” Ari said, somehow managing to sound more irritated than tired, “isn’t a town.”

It wasn’t. The sign pointing them in the direction of town had been fresh enough that it was clear that this was _not_ the town it was referring to, but they’d seen a path and thought that there might have been some shelter. Instead, there were derelict buildings long reclaimed by nature, all the wood rotted through until only the stone foundations remained, vines splitting through the floor and winding through empty windows.

“That one is still standing,” Aelar offered, pushing his bangs out of the way of his glasses. They were wet enough that they kept trying to plaster themselves down over his eyes, to add their own form of blindness to an already low-visibility experience. 

Ari looked at the single house. The single remaining house in the entire decayed village.

“No,” Ari said, because staying in the only mysteriously standing building in a ghost village was exactly the sort of thing that he absolutely did not want to deal with when he was already squishing through his boots with every step.

Aelar looked up at him, reproachfully, using his glasses to push his bangs more firmly out of the way at the cost of his glasses being perched on top of his head. “Well,” Aelar said, slowly, glancing back at the path they’d come down with a clear, carefully floated question in his eyes. They'd been traveling for a couple weeks, now, and they were still at least two days from town, which meant their options were limited. 

“_Fine,_” Ari said, because he _didn’t_ have a decent alternate plan that wasn’t “camp out in the rain and hope the wizard doesn’t die of elf pneumonia”. 

Aelar offered Ari a thin, wane smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes, and Ari staunchly ignored it as he moved towards the house. 

It was really more of a mansion, which became clearer with every unpleasant squelching step in the mud. It had some signs of wear and tear through the ages, but given the state of the rest of the buildings in the area, it was in much better condition than it had any right to be. The windows were all intact, the stone was unharmed, and the vines creeping up to carpet the exterior were more atmospheric than unkempt. If you tilted your head.

“This place is definitely cursed,” Ari said.

Aelar looked at him. Aelar looked behind them. A particularly loud flash of lightning illuminated the expression on his face in perfect highlight when the instant accompaniment of thunder split through the air loud enough that Aelar flinched. 

Ari sighed. “At least stand behind me,” he said, sounding annoyed about the fact that he even cared enough to direct Aelar behind him. He didn’t wait before he stepped up, carefully pulling the door open a few inches. He waited. 

Nothing happened.

“Can you tell if it’s haunted?” Ari asked.

“Um,” Aelar said, peeking around Ari’s back. “Not from outside.”

Which figured, but Ari had still had the briefest glimmer of misguided hope. This was, he was absolutely certain, why he usually didn’t bother to hope for anything.

He pushed the door in the rest of the way, other hand resting on his rapier. If there was something dead in there that wanted to harm them, that meant it would be corporeal enough for him to stab, which didn’t make him feel better, exactly, but at least made him feel marginally more in control of the situation. An empty manor greeted them, and when that was all that greeted them, Ari stepped inside, Aelar fast on his heels.

Aelar closed the door, politely, and once they’d been cut off from the worst of the sound of the rain, the only thing they could actively hear was the sound of water dripping off of them in stubborn rivulets.

Aelar sneezed.

“At least it’s dry,” he offered, a second later, trying to rub at his nose with his sleeve and realizing that instead it just made his whole face more uncomfortably damp. 

Ari made a noise that was decidedly noncommittal while also managing to sound completely unconvinced.

“Come on,” Ari said, stepping forward. Against the stone floor, his footsteps seemed even louder; the house was a dusty, empty tomb that seemed anything but benign. “We need to find a fireplace or something.”

Aelar looked at the door to their left, bound with heavy chains, and then the door on the opposite wall, which had once been bound but was now merely closed with the remnant of what were once chains. Neither of these options seemed particularly moralizing. 

“We could try upstairs?” Aelar suggested in that careful, cautious way that he framed nearly all of his suggestions. “There’s probably a fireplace, and it might be easier to get out of, if we… need to.” 

Aelar moved forward, following up on his suggestion with an intensity born of someone who is very tired of feeling excessively moist, and Ari held out an arm to hold him back. 

“Hold up,” Ari said. It was a quick spell, to tell him if there was anything undead nearby. It was a nice, reliable spell that had told him the location of innumerable fiends over the course of his career, and this time it came back thoroughly uninformative. There were, the spell indicated, probably some ghosts around, but fuck if Ari could tell exactly where or exactly how menacing they were. 

All in all, a healthy use of his rapidly depleting energy.

Aelar followed suit, mouth moving across words he didn’t quite voice. He, too, got a resoundingly unhelpful result: there sure was magic in the mansion, but he couldn’t manage to pin down what kind of magic it _was_. 

They glanced at each other, realized that neither of them had a shred of helpful information, and sighed. 

“Upstairs it is,” Ari said, annoyance coloring his voice. He didn’t have to tell Aelar to stay behind him, this time: Aelar followed close at his side, casting unhurried curious looks at the surroundings. 

They got two steps up the stairs before a glint of light caught Ari’s attention. He whipped back around, ready to fight, and then realized the ghoul he was prepared to fight was… a cat.

“Oh,” Aelar said, immediately dropping down to offer a hand out to the cat. “Hello.”

“What,” Ari said, “are you doing.”

“Petting him?” Aelar offered, doing exactly that.

“You don’t know what he is,” Ari said, even though he, also, did not know exactly what the cat was.

“A cat,” Aelar said. The cat preened underneath Aelar’s affections, shoving its face into his hand to demand continued attention. “I mean, he’s probably something else, but I don’t think he’s evil.”

“Uh-huh.”

“He’s probably just trying to hide from the rain like we are,” Aelar continued. Ari was absolutely certain that a lich could have risen through the floor and Aelar would have completely ignored it in favor of petting the cat, who was deceptively rolling onto its back to show off its belly. 

“Why don’t you ask the cat where to find a fireplace,” Ari said.

The sarcasm in his voice was immediately lost in translation, Aelar scratching the cat under the chin. “Do you know where a fireplace? We really need to get warm,” Aelar said. The cat allowed the petting for another moment before finally rolling back onto its feet, shaking itself off very thoroughly.

The cat chirped.

“I think that’s a yes,” Aelar said, following when the cat began to leave, trotting over to the wide doors that had been chained over and then resolutely broken into.

“The cat is going to get us killed,” Ari replied. 

“She’s _helping_,” Aelar insisted, casting a glance at Ari over his shoulder.

“Hey, wait a damn second,” Ari said, as Aelar reached for the door like they weren’t in an obviously haunted mansion full of god only knew what. “Let me open the door.” 

The cat sat back on its haunches, as though politely waiting for Ari to open the door. He stared at it -- her? -- for a moment, and then fixed Aelar with his best annoyed expression. Frustratingly, it seemed to do as little damage as ever, as Aelar just looked back like he was politely confused.

If Ari kept rolling his eyes, he was going to detach a retina, at this rate, so rather than that, he took a step to the side of the door, thoroughly out of range if anything was waiting on the other side, and delicately pushed the unlocked door open.

Aelar waited for a solid five seconds before he gently peered around Ari to look inside, and the cat immediately took off on a contented trot inside. 

The dining hall inside wasn’t particularly large, but it was well wrapped with the trappings of comfortable wealth. There had been food on the tables, once, but now all that remained was the delicate china, the pure silver cutlery that had since tarnished to a mercurial grey. There was a thick layer of dust over everything, and Aelar raised his wet sleeve up to his nose again before he sneezed. 

The cat ignored all of this and continued to walk to the far edge of the hall. There was another door there, much less grandiose than the initial door, and Ari headed for it. If they were going to follow the cat then he might as well give in and follow the damn cat. It wasn’t that it couldn’t get worse -- the cat could absolutely be leading them directly into danger -- but their alternatives, frankly, sucked. 

This time, at least, both Aelar and the cat waited for Ari to open the door. This one swung wide when he opened it, and then promptly fell off its hinges; the resulting dust cloud left the cat rushing into the other room and Aelar dissolving into a small fit of sneezing.

“Uuu,” Aelar said, softly, as Ari walked into the room. Thankfully, nothing in the small kitchen seemed to be trying to attack them, because there wasn’t anything inside except for a very smug looking cat sitting next to the fireplace.

“See, she,” Aelar started, breaking off into another sneeze. “She knew where a fireplace was.”

The cat chirped again, then hopped up onto the nearby table.

There was another door in the room, off to the far side of the fireplace. It was heavy, iron-wrought, and locked with something that Ari could tell was magical even from afar. He tested it to make certain that it was locked and not something he could easily budge before he even thought about relaxing. 

Aelar stepped forward, nudging the old logs in the fireplace closer to the center before he held his hand out, sending the entire thing up into a healthy fire in a manner of seconds. It washed the room into light, illuminating the corners far better than even Ari’s darkvision had previously allowed. Aelar looked nearly translucent in the fire, washed out and even paler, his clothing all dampened into black against his own subdued palette of white.

Ari was reluctant to take his armor off in a place as unknown as this, but if he didn’t, he was going to be considerably slower to dry. That wasn’t even _touching_ on the fact that letting chainmail air dry was one of the least preferable things you could do. In the end, he stripped out of his outer layer, setting it up to dry near the fire and wringing the extra water out of his hair with a grimace.

“Wow,” Aelar said, watching the puddle form. 

“Don’t act like yours isn’t just as wet,” Ari said, irritated at the implication he was certain was in there somewhere. 

Aelar stripped off his outer six layers of clothing in response, his coat and vest and robe and scarf and whatever else he had on being carefully laid out on the table until he was left in just his thin black turtleneck and pants. It was entirely too much clothing, but it probably kept him… warm?

Ari didn’t understand the ins and outs of elvish fashion or why Aelar needed to wear eighteen layers when it was still more or less summer.

When Aelar cast his hands through his own hair, it cast out considerably less water than Ari’s had, which Ari felt was proof that there was no actual justice in the world. Aelar combed his fingers through his hair to put it back to some semblance of order, while Ari just gave up and pulled his into a ponytail that mostly served to make it stop touching his neck quite so much when it was still wet.

The cat, waiting until they had both started to warm up, chirped again. 

“Hmm?” Aelar asked. His eyes tracked over to the cat, who was sitting, very pointedly, atop a wine rack.

“Huh,” Ari said. He grabbed one of the bottles off, figuring if anything in the place was cursed it was probably _not_ the alcohol. The vintage was about three centuries prior, which tracked, based on how dilapidated the rest of the village was. It didn’t make sense with how intact the mansion itself was, but Ari was already working on the assumption that there were several factors at play here and none of them were good. Except _maybe_ the alcohol.

The cat meowed, this time, pawing gently at the bottles.

“I’m not giving you wine,” Ari said. The cat meowed. “I don’t even have a cork screw.”

“I can fix that,” Aelar offered. “If you want.” 

Ari fixed Aelar with a Look that clearly stated that they did not, in fact, need to waste time or magical energy on getting wine for a cat. Aelar received the look and responded with one of his own, one of those looks that demonstrated that despite his delicate appearance he was perfectly capable of refusing to listen to a damn thing Ari said, when he wanted to.

Aelar was lucky he was decent in a fight, or Ari definitely would have left him behind at the last town. This was becoming something of a mantra in Ari’s head, and he was sticking to it, even as fondness crept up under the guise of familiarity sticking to his skin.

For the moment, the elf contented himself with murmuring something low enough that Ari didn’t bother to try and hear it, a bit of string in his hand coalescing into a shadow that grew in shape until it was nearly the size of Aelar himself. The shadow took on a vaguely humanoid form, if a human didn’t have any limbs whatsoever and resembled a stick more strongly, and then shuffled over to Ari, holding its lack of hands out for the bottle of wine. 

Ari set the bottle on the table. The shadow took it with one long, extremely creepy shadow tentacle. The bottle was ensconced firmly in shadow for a long moment before it was reproduced, efficiently and perfectly opened without a shred of cork hitting the inside of the bottle.

“Can that thing fight?” Ari asked.

“Oh, no,” Aelar responded. His eyes tracked the room, the shadow following his gaze and shuffling over to root through the cabinets until it produced two reasonably intact goblets, which were quickly fed to the shadow and then rebirthed in a much cleaner form. “It can just do little things… Pour wine, hang up clothing, things like that. If you hit it, it’ll go away.”

“Hm,” Ari said, strongly considering the merits of doing just that.

“Don’t hit it,” Aelar said. The shadow poured wine into both goblets, then set the bottle down, moving over to busy itself with fussing over their clothing. 

The wine, at least, tasted fine. Ari was cognizant of the fact that drinking it could mean getting himself poisoned, but he was pretty sure that it was not in any way poisoned. It tasted fine, at any rate, and the cat seemed happy enough to drink out of Aelar’s untouched glass. 

“Cats don’t drink wine,” Ari stated. The cat looked at him, and then, very pointedly, resumed drinking the wine. Aelar’s laugh was still audible even though he tried to muffle it with his hand, averting his eyes when Ari looked at him. 

Aelar seemed content to settle down by the fire, and the cat, after finishing the wine (the _entire_ glass, somehow), followed suit, curling up into a round ouroboros near Aelar’s feet. The house still felt oppressive in a way that Ari couldn’t quite put words to, pressing down in on them in a way that he knew Aelar could feel just as acutely. 

“Can you figure anything out about this lock?” Ari asked, finally. The crackling of the fire was at odds with the sound of the rain outside, two peaceful ambient noises combining to make him strongly consider letting his guard down. 

Aelar looked at the lock from his chair. He leaned forward and looked harder. Finally, with no small amount of resignation, he got up, stepping over to trace his hands down the padlock. 

“It’s not anything that I can open,” he said, after a few moments. “I might be able to… if we were planning to stay here several years…”

“Let’s not,” Ari said.

Aelar nodded, and Ari was glad the idea of staying in this mansion any longer than necessary was something neither of them were invested in. 

“I wonder what it’s locking out?” Aelar said, sounding exactly as curious as Ari would expect a wizard to be. Ari was pretty sure they were suicidal in their pursuit of knowledge. 

“Or what it’s locking _in_,” Ari offered. It seemed like a reasonable assumption to him, but Aelar’s glance back was more worried than anything else.

“I don’t think--” Aelar started, and then cut off when a _bang_ echoed through the room, his flinch preventing whatever else he was going to say from coming out. 

Ari was on his feet in an instant, turning to face the direction of the noise. “Shit,” he said, because of course it couldn’t be that easy; of course they couldn’t comfortably rest by a fire until the worst of the storm had passed. The cat was on its feet just as quickly, and Aelar wasn’t far behind, all three of them giving an uneasy glance at the door that lead back out to the hall.

“Oh,” Aelar said softly, in the uneasy silence that followed. “I don’t like that.”

Ari didn’t reply. He didn’t think he needed to, not when he already had one hand resting on his rapier. He moved cautiously, as silent as he could, heading back to the door to look around it into the empty dining hall.

It was still empty. It was as untouched as before, and neither Aelar nor the cat seemed like they wanted to move any closer when the loud banging noise echoed again. 

“I don’t think it’s getting any closer,” Aelar said, his voice barely above a whisper and only so that he could be heard. He stepped over to Ari, cautiously falling in step, quarterstaff back in his hands like it was going to do a bit of good against whatever the depths of this house were going to throw at them. 

Aelar reached out, taking his cloak from his shadow servant and wrapping it back around himself when a third bang slammed through the house like a physical presence. It was louder, this time, but not _closer_ \-- but the only way out was going to be back the way they came. 

Aelar looked at Ari, carefully, his red gaze making no attempts to disguise the hesitance in his face.

“We’re getting out of here,” Ari said, making the executive decision. He snatched his outer layers back up, pulling them on as he strode back through the dining hall. Aelar was close on his heels, the cat in his arms, his several layers of clothing being tugged back into place by the shadow… _thing_ that he’d conjured up. 

They made it to the entrance, and they stopped. 

“Did the chains,” Aelar asked, very quietly, his hand braced on Ari’s side to better direct his words only to him, “look like that before?”

They were in disarray. They were still keeping the door on the other side of the hall shut, and it was a small miracle when the explanation for the loud noise made itself known: the doors bulged outwards for a moment, pressing hard against the chains before presumably moving back, letting the heavy doors seem to almost sag with relief.

“Fuck that,” Ari said -- quietly -- turning on his heels and wrenching the front door open. 

The door did not open.

Aelar inhaled sharply. Ari was strong, and his physical strength was one of the things that made his job easier, so for him to fail to open a door that he’d opened so easily earlier -- 

Ari tried again. The door, stubbornly, refused to so much as budge.

“_Shit_,” Ari said. The lingering question in the air was _now what_, but he didn’t get to ask it -- neither of them did, not when the sound of something banging into the doors was even louder, terrifyingly close. 

Aelar’s hands went up to his ears, the pointed tips peeking out around his fingertips, the cat falling from his grasp and skittering back behind his legs. 

“Where do we go?” Aelar asked, the question directed as much at Ari as at the cat. Ari didn’t have a damn clue, but the cat, the fucking cat, didn’t even hesitate before it took off towards the staircase, aiming for one of the rooms underneath it. There was a flicker of movement in the doorway to the room, far larger than the cat, and Ari stopped, grabbing at Aelar’s shoulder. He missed; he wound up with a handful of faintly wet white hair, and Aelar winced, but stopped moving, which was what he’d been trying to accomplish.

“_Wait_,” Ari said, because as tempting as it was to get away from whatever was chained up in that room, he didn’t want to walk into an even bigger mess. “There’s something there.”

“The cat--”

“The cat could be in on this!”

Aelar closed his mouth, but didn’t reply. His gaze was worried as it looked from Ari to the doorway the cat had taken, and Ari reached out with as much of his power as he could, trying to figure out exactly what was _there_ and coming up completely short. 

Aelar’s hand moved, grabbing onto the fabric of Ari’s sleeve. “We don’t have a choice,” Aelar murmured, soft and worried, and Ari allowed himself to be tugged exactly one step forward before he stepped in front of Aelar, annoyed and surly at the entire situation. Like hell he was going to let Aelar walk first into a room with what Ari was pretty sure was going to be some sort of undead.

This night had gone from miserable to a complete disaster in record time, and honestly, Ari wasn’t sure which one of them he should blame. It seemed like bad luck followed both of them.

Ari got to the door the cat had entered, waited at the entrance, and then, very slowly, pushed the heavy wood inwards.

**Author's Note:**

> the official "part one" of this campaign/novelization! this one will be multichaptered and involve spooky haunted shit. this is also very experimental on my part, trying to write a decent story out of a dungeon crawl -- it's a lot of good practice! i don't know how to write fight scenes, honestly.
> 
> you can find me @warsfeils on twitter! come talk to me about dnd, it has consumed me.


End file.
